After a broken blue rubber tube put Lewis Hamilton out of the Australian Grand Prix, it was remarkable to hear that Nico Rosberg's retirement in Singapore was caused by contamination from a substance used in pre-event servicing.
This chemical, invisible to team members working on the car, sat undetected inside Rosberg's steering column for the entire Singapore weekend. And unluckily for the German, it only caused the short circuit that wrecked his controls at the very worst time: just before the start of the race.
The two freak failures for Hamilton and Rosberg, which may yet have a defining influence on the world title battle, are a stark reminder of how tiny circumstances can have huge consequences for state-of-the-art Formula 1 teams that spend hundreds of millions of pounds on trying to ensure that things work perfectly.